Overtime Pay: Am I being ripped off?

TELLIT01

Overtime rates are often calculated on base salary, excluding any special payments such as the NVQ3 allowance.  They would also exclude shift payments, as another example.  At one place I worked, overtime payments were a fixed rate, not based on salary at all.

Floop1977

Marcon said:

Employers must state in the written terms (written statement of particulars):

• what hours are classed as overtime
• what the rate of pay is for overtime

Source: https://www.acas.org.uk/pay-for-working-extra-hours

So, my employer does not do this.

ChasingtheWelshdream

I am on NJC in a local authority. We have published payscales with annual and hourly rates, based on full-time as 37 hours.

Any additional allowances are stated separately on our payslips and not included in the hourly rate. Eg on call, tool or first aides allowances.

Additional hours are standard hourly rate for part-time workers. Once they hit 37 hours in any given week this increases to time and a third.

Full-time employees are paid time and a third.

Any additional hours worked accrue holiday pay (% dependent on length of service) and is listed separately on payslips.

I had assumed NJC was standard T&Cs, but if not then I don’t know if the above is helpful or not? I am happy to check NJC scale points for you if you like.

Edited to add: This assumes the employee is claiming additional hours on top of their contracted hours via a timesheet. Rather than having a temporary increase in contracted hours. In those instances annual leave itself is accrued to be used as normal rather than a monetary amount added.

mcpitman

• I don't (yet) understand the points made about holiday pay. We aren't paid for days we aren't working - we are paid for the days we do work, and for each unit of work that we do, we accrue some paid holiday entitlement. If we did no overtime, we would still be receiving £X amount of pay for Y hours worked, so the hourly rate should be £X/Y per hour. The fact that the organisation is choosing to calculate the overtime rate of pay on values of X and Y that do not reflect our actual salary or our actual hours feels bogus, and designed to minimise their costs at the worker's expense. It might be legal but it feels immoral. Either way, this is an area where I need to do further work to figure things out.

Where did you get the 1748 hours worked annually from in your OP?

As an aside i think i can roughly explain my maths to explain the holidays.

There are (on average) 252 working days in a year, accounting for 8 bank holidays.
If you work 7 hours a day that totals 1764 hours worked per year.

Therefore your hourly rate would be "base salary" / 1764 or 25409/1764 = £14.40 p/h

An paid annual leave, here's a handy link https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/holiday-pay-the-basics

Floop1977

ChasingtheWelshdream said:

I had assumed NJC was standard T&Cs, but if not then I don’t know if the above is helpful or not? I am happy to check NJC scale points for you if you like.

My employer says we are "paid in line with" NJC pay scales, so the base salary is based on NJC Spinepoints 10-14... but beyond that, they don't recognise the NJC T&Cs. For example, the NJC annual payscales are based on Local Government working hours of 37 per week during regular office hours... but my organisation considers full time during term time to be 42 hours per week, many of these worked at unsociable hours, up to 10.00pm at night.

mcpitman said:

Where did you get the 1748 hours worked annually from in your OP?

We are required to work:

38 school term weeks, doing 42 hours per week = 1596 hours
1 week (5 days) of INSET, doing 40 hours for this week (i.e. 8 hours per day) = 40 hours
14 additional days worth of "directed hours", 14 days = 2.8 weeks x 40 hours per week = 112 hours
Total of the above three = 1748 hours per year

This actually may have highlighted something I hadn't considered, namely that the NJC annual pay rate may take into account a specific amount of holiday per year, whereas in my role we get considerably more holiday, so we win on that front. We are expected to work 41.8 weeks per year, leaving us with 10.2 weeks of holiday. Given this point, maybe this is where we win, and I should get over the overtime issue...